Mark Dowie takes an extensive look at the sweeping land use changes at play in Detroit, and sees more than just a few green shoots. Detroit is exhibit A when its comes to the term food desert, with stores like Kroger and A & P, having long since packed their bags for greener patures, along with the more than 1.2 million people who been part of the grand exodus out of the city. Dowie asks, what happens when a 140 sq mile city only needs 50 sq miles of living space? When there are 103,000 empty lots, with over 60,000 owned by the city?
One obvious solution is to grow their own, and the urban backyard garden boom that is sweeping the nation has caught hold in Detroit, particularly in neighborhoods recently settled by immigrants from agrarian cultures of Laos and Bangladesh, who are almost certain to become major players in an agrarian Detroit. Add to that the five hundred or so twenty-by-twenty-foot community plots and a handful of three- to ten-acre farms cultured by church and non-profit groups, and during its four-month growing season, Detroit is producing somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of its food supply inside city limits—more than most American cities, but nowhere near enough to allay the food desert problem. About 3 percent of the groceries sold at the Eastern Market are homegrown; the rest are brought into Detroit by a handful of peri-urban farmers and about one hundred and fifty freelance food dealers who buy their produce from Michigan farms between thirty and one hundred miles from the city and truck it into the market.
There are more visionaries in Detroit than in most Rust-Belt cities, and thus more visions of a community rising from the ashes of a moribund industry to become, if not an urban paradise, something close to it. The most intriguing visionaries in Detroit, at least the ones who drew me to the city, were those who imagine growing food among the ruins—chard and tomatoes on vacant lots (there are over 103,000 in the city, sixty thousand owned by the city), orchards on former school grounds, mushrooms in open basements, fish in abandoned factories, hydroponics in bankrupt department stores, livestock grazing on former golf courses, high-rise farms in old hotels, vermiculture, permaculture, hydroponics, aquaponics, waving wheat where cars were once test-driven, and winter greens sprouting inside the frames of single-story bungalows stripped of their skin and re-sided with Plexiglas—a homemade greenhouse. Those are just a few of the agricultural technologies envisioned for the urban prairie Detroit has become.
This is a sweeping vision for a city on its deathbed. It brings up countless city planning questions. What does transportation look like? What other infrastructure is need? And what would look like to have city skyscrapers competing with grain silos in the city’s skyline?
Another problem man cities would encounter is soil quality. As Michelle Obama has experienced, there are all kinds of chemicals lurking in city land. There are ways to reclaim the soil, and Detroit has another factor in its favor - the city was once rich farmland, a century or so ago.
As Detroit was built on rich agricultural land, the soil beneath the city is fertile and arable. Certainly some of it is contaminated with the wastes of heavy industry, but not so badly that it’s beyond remediation. In fact, phyto-remediation, using certain plants to remove toxic chemicals permanently from the soil, is already practiced in parts of the city. And some of the plants used for remediation can be readily converted to biofuels. Others can be safely fed to livestock.
Leading the way in Detroit’s soil remediation is Malik Yakini, owner of the Black Star Community Book Store and founder of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. Yakini and his colleagues begin the remediation process by removing abandoned house foundations and toxic debris from vacated industrial sites. Often that is all that need be done to begin farming. Throw a little compost on the ground, turn it in, sow some seeds, and water it. Water in Detroit is remarkably clean and plentiful.
Besides providing access to fresh fruits and vegetables, there’s a number of other positive indicators associated with urban farming. The growth of urban farm plots have been associated with lowering crime rates, increasing community connectivity, and bringing in jobs.
Farmland retaking cities is uncharted territory. There is bound to be numerous problems that arise. Yet, this is also a grand experiment, an experiment that might just save a city from its ashes.
